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| By The Free Press |
It’s Tuesday, December 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Hadley Freeman remembers Rob Reiner—while the president mocks the dead. David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt on the twisted logic of anti-Jewish hate. Charles Lane on why Amnesty delayed its October 7 report. And more.
But first: The Chinese dissident Beijing can’t break.
What does a hero look like? Well, today, a hero looks a lot like Jimmy Lai.
Lai is the founder of Apple Daily, once Hong Kong’s most influential pro-democracy newspaper. Five years ago, after Chinese president Xi Jinping imposed the sweeping national security law that effectively crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms, Lai became one of the Chinese government’s primary targets. In 2020, he was arrested and sent to a maximum security prison. He has now spent over 1,800 days in solitary confinement.
On Monday, a panel of judges in Hong Kong convicted Lai, 78, of sedition and collusion with foreign forces in what was quickly condemned as a show trial. He now faces a potential sentence of life in prison in Hong Kong.
Lai became a wealthy man in Hong Kong through a successful clothing business. But after conquering the business world, he turned to journalism and publishing. As Hong Kong’s freedoms faded, Lai, a British citizen, could have fled. Instead, he stayed.
As his daughter, Claire Lai, put it to me on Monday, “a man doesn’t abandon his ship.”
“My father is a man who stands for truth. He stands for freedom of press. He stands for faith,” she said.
Today in The Free Press, we bring you two pieces from those who know Jimmy well. The first is from Claire. She writes of a father who arrived in Hong Kong with only a half-eaten chocolate bar in his pocket and found “family, God, freedom, and truth” there. But, she writes, her father is not a martyr. “He is still fighting for his life from prison.”
The second piece is from Natan Sharansky, a man who knows what it is like to face tyranny. Sharansky was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in 1977 on manufactured charges of treason and spent nine years in a gulag. He writes to his friend Jimmy, who sits alone in a cell in Hong Kong, and offers some advice: “These dictators think that you are facing a life sentence. In fact, they are the ones who will be living as slaves all their lives.” Read Natan’s full letter to Jimmy in our pages.
—Frannie Block
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Rob Reiner Deserved a Happily Ever After | ||||||
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Mr. President, Don’t Mock the Dead | ||||||
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Jews Are Being Sent Back Into Hiding | ||||||
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Amnesty International Can’t Handle the Truth About Hamas | ||||||
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